I discovered something new to me. I got my new Rezound from Amazon last Wednesday. What with one thing and another, I didn't get it activated until Thursday morning. I played with it all day Thursday, and GPS was horrible. I walked around in the open for 2-1/2 miles with MyTracks on, and it never got a fix. GPS status was showing two weak satellites and zero fixes. The GPS status screen, BTW, thought I was hundreds of miles away.
Since the reviews of Rezound praised its GPS, I was convinced my unit was defective. Bright and shiny Friday morning, I called Amazon and they promised to ship a replacement by the end of day, expected delivery Monday.
Friday night I got around to playing with it again. All of a sudden the GPS was fine. Saturday off and on I tried to jigger the settings to recreate the problem I'd had Thursday. No matter what I did, the GPS was solid and locked quickly and firmly--as much or more so than my Droid I, whose GPS I was quite content with.
With help from my techie nephew, I think I understand what happened. As we all know, GPS doesn't work worth a darn without the cell phone transceiver on, at least on Verizon and maybe other systems. Until the cell towers triangulate our rough location, the GPS doesn't kick in to refine position. As I said, my phone wasn't activated until Thursday morning. I think the identification of my phone hadn't been propagated to my local towers database until maybe Friday. When I made a call, the tower database would query the mother ship to confirm I was a Verizon subscriber--but the preliminary fix for GPS purposes must just rely on the current local database, and if it doesn't recognize the phone, it won't kick back location data.
Anyone have a better explanation?
Tomorrow I get to call Amazon back and explain why I don't need the replacement unit after all.
Since the reviews of Rezound praised its GPS, I was convinced my unit was defective. Bright and shiny Friday morning, I called Amazon and they promised to ship a replacement by the end of day, expected delivery Monday.
Friday night I got around to playing with it again. All of a sudden the GPS was fine. Saturday off and on I tried to jigger the settings to recreate the problem I'd had Thursday. No matter what I did, the GPS was solid and locked quickly and firmly--as much or more so than my Droid I, whose GPS I was quite content with.
With help from my techie nephew, I think I understand what happened. As we all know, GPS doesn't work worth a darn without the cell phone transceiver on, at least on Verizon and maybe other systems. Until the cell towers triangulate our rough location, the GPS doesn't kick in to refine position. As I said, my phone wasn't activated until Thursday morning. I think the identification of my phone hadn't been propagated to my local towers database until maybe Friday. When I made a call, the tower database would query the mother ship to confirm I was a Verizon subscriber--but the preliminary fix for GPS purposes must just rely on the current local database, and if it doesn't recognize the phone, it won't kick back location data.
Anyone have a better explanation?
Tomorrow I get to call Amazon back and explain why I don't need the replacement unit after all.
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